Went back to square one and created a new QSortFilterProxyModel to filter the list of xml:ids coming from the HcmcImtDoc object. This has solved the problem; I now have a working regular expression filter in the GUI, which can be used to select items in the list.

A new problem has emerged, though: each xml:id in the list is duplicated. This is not caused by the new filter; if I change back to the original unfiltered behaviour, I still get two of each item in the list. So this is due to what looks like duplicated code in HcmcImtDoc, which I think ended up in there when I was making changes to allow switching on and off of namespace-awareness. Shouldn't be hard to fix.